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The purpose of this paper is to celebrate the manifold contributions made by Michael Thomas, marketing professor extraordinary.

This paper is an exercise in autobiographical memory, coupled with the subjective personal introspective procedures advocated by many leading marketing scholars, most notably, Steven Gould and Morris Holbrook.

The paper shows that ornithology is an apt metaphor – analogy, rather – for Professor Thomas's many and varied contributions to marketing thought.

The paper comes closer than most to defining the quintessential Michael Thomas.

This chapter describes how the technologies of big data might apply to rural contexts. It considers the relative advantages and disadvantages of such ‘new’ innovations.

It uses two case studies, one of online community specialist groups linked to rural activities and a second from a policy shift relating to firearm legislation in the English context.

The chapter suggests that digital data in the forms discussed here can be both benign and underutilised in its potential. In relation to the management of datasets holding information on firearm owners, these need careful reflection regarding their establishment, access and general use.

The chapter provides insight into the rural context and makes a case that such locales are not immune from the influence of the dataverse. The appearance of ‘big data’ here is not without political implications. The case of UK firearm legislation reform demonstrates the implications of policy falling short of its potential and how a social science analysis can unpack the operation of power as well as position the debate more broadly.

We believe that management and strategy scholars should engage in research around the role of informal economic activity in the perpetuation of poverty on the African continent.

We argue that the study of informal economic activity, because of its explicit and often purposefully created hidden nature, requires a new method of inquiry and we propose that the practice of hermeneutics provides such a method. Our chapter describes the foundations of hermeneutic research and outlines key principles to guide inquiry.

We move from a rigorous introduction to the general method (a form of hermeneutic investigation) and its implementation in the narrative interview. The chapter concludes with a set of practical guidelines to help researchers employ narrative interviews to uncover collective memory structures and gain deeper insight and real understanding of the workings of informal economies.

We believe this chapter will motivate management and strategy scholars to examine the role of informal economic activity in the perpetuation of poverty in Africa and provide a starting point for developing the tools necessary to engage in research that creates a real and deep understanding of the contexts of poverty on the African continent.

Methodological pluralism in consumer research is usually confined to post‐positivist interpretive approaches. Argues, however, that a positivistic stance, radical behaviourism, can enrich epistemological debate among researchers with the recognition of radical behaviourism′s ultimate reliance on interpretation as well as science. Although radical behaviourist explanation was initially founded on Machian positivism, its account of complex social behaviours such as purchase and consumption is necessarily interpretive, inviting comparison with the hermeneutical approaches currently emerging in consumer research. Radical behaviourist interpretation attributes meaning to behaviour by identifying its environmental determinants, especially the learning history of the individual in relation to the consequences similar prior behaviour has effected. The nature of such interpretation is demonstrated for purchase and consumption responses by means of a critique of radical behaviourism as applied to complex human activity. In the process, develops and applies a framework for radical behaviourist interpretation of purchase and consumption to four operant equifinality classes of consumer behaviour: accomplishment, pleasure, accumulation and maintenance. Some epistemological implications of this framework, the behavioural perspective model (BPM) of purchase and consumption, are discussed in the context of the relativity and incommensurability of research paradigms. Finally, evaluates the interpretive approach, particularly in terms of its relevance to the nature and understanding of managerial marketing.